Last spring, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) drew the nation's attention to Lynn Weber, a women's studies professor at the University of South Carolina who requires students to consent to a series of ideological claims as a condition of talking in class. Here are Professor Weber's "Guidelines for Class Discussion:"

• Acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.
• Acknowledge that one mechanism of institutionalized racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, etc., is that we are all systematically taught misinformation about our own group and about members of other groups. This is true for members of privileged and oppressed groups.
• Agree not to blame ourselves or others for the misinformation we have learned, but to accept responsibility for not repeating misinformation after we have learned otherwise.
• Assume that people-both the people we study and the members of the class-always do the best they can.
• Actively pursue information about our own groups and those of others.
• Share information about our groups with other members of the class and we will never demean, devalue, or in any way "put down" people for their experiences.
• Agree to combat actively the myths and stereotypes about our own groups and other groups so that we can break down the walls which prohibit group cooperation and group gain.
• Create a safe atmosphere for open discussion. If members of the class may wish to make comments that they do not want repeated outside the classroom, they can preface their remarks with a request that the class agree not to repeat the remarks.

Under the guise of creating a "safe" classroom environment, Professor Weber was clearly and unequivocally prescribing politics and imposing beliefs on her students. She was also making conformity to those politics and beliefs a condition of a good grade: you weren't allowed to talk in class unless you accepted her loaded and highly debatable claims as givens, and you couldn't earn a good grade unless you talked in class.

When the issue of Professor Weber's doctrinaire pedagogy was brought to FIRE's attention last spring, FIRE wrote privately to the President of the University of South Carolina, citing both legal precedent and USC's own policies to prove how far in the wrong Professor Weber was. When there was no response, FIRE released the story to the media. Stories appeared at CNSNews.com, the Washington Times, Fox News, and Townhall.com.

And then the story died. USC did nothing, and the nation was so obsessed with the Snehal Shingavi fiasco at Berkeley that it never really managed to register what was happening in South Carolina. I've thought for months that that was too bad. Shingavi discouraged conservatives from taking his freshman composition classes twice. Lynn Weber has been making ideological conformity a condition of class participation for nearly two decades. Weber first wrote her guidelines 18 years ago, when she was teaching Sociology at Memphis State. She has since formally published them--they appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly 18 (Spring/Summer 1990):126-134. A revised version was also published in a 2000 sociology textbook. The guidelines have been widely disseminated: a quick Google search reveals that a number of professors across the country use Weber's guidelines in their own classes (here are examples from a sociology course at the University of Delaware, a nursing course at the University of Washington, a sociology course at Southern Illinois University, and a sociology course at Texas). In other words, Lynn Weber and her pedagogically misguided acolytes have done a lot more damage than Snehal Shingavi ever did. I was disappointed that the issue got lost in the Berkeley uproar, and I've been waiting to see how FIRE would follow up on USC's arrogant refusal to respond to its polite but unmistakably menacing letter.

So now I have my answer. Lynn Weber is back in the news, and FIRE is right there with her. The Chronicle of Higher Education has (finally!) done a detailed story on Weber and her guidelines (replete with online colloquy), and it's a corker. Weber gets to have her say--but she comes off looking clueless, self-serving, and painfully blinded by her own manipulative brand of utopianism. Of the guidelines, she says, "They set a framework for how we are going to go about discussing things in class. I don't think there is anything wrong with them." Of FIRE--an organization absolutely committed to defending free speech on campus--she says, "I really hate that an organization like this can silence people who are doing good things." Professor Weber does not seem to have understood that she is the one who is silencing people, and that this is categorically not a "good thing."

USC administrators understand what Weber does not. Perhaps they are unusually enlightened specimens of that normally spineless academic animal, homo administratus. Or perhaps they have done their homework (unlike Weber), and know that FIRE is the pitbull of campus watchdog organizations. In any case, they appear to have come around since the spring. They have allowed themselves to be interviewed, and they have taken care in those interviews to distance themselves from guidelines they know they cannot defend. Weber's departmental chairman spoke with surprising candor, openly acknowledging what Weber categorically disputes, that the guidelines are not about how to behave, but about what to think: "I've seen a lot of syllabi, and I've never seen anything like that. Ideological guidelines are kind of unusual," he said. Of the guideline that asks students to "agree to combat actively the myths and stereotypes about our own groups and other groups so that we can break down the walls that prohibit group cooperation and group gain," he observed that "It sounds as if she is requiring political activism outside the classroom in order to fully participate in the classroom."

Administrators at USC have met with Weber several times but have not succeeded in explaining to her just how off-base and out of touch she is. It must be a tough call for them. Do nothing about Weber, get sued (FIRE has dropped hints in the direction). Do something about Weber--and, quite possibly, get sued. She has made it clear that she feels she is being "silenced." Cries of discrimination and a Title IX lawsuit can't be too far behind. The deans are consequently handling Weber with care: they will continue, they avow, to have "conversations" with her, and they will "work with her and other professors to make sure the free-speech rights of students are not abrogated"--a statement that says a lot about USC's internal opinion about whether Weber's guidelines are or are not constitutional.

Weber recently refused an invitation to discuss her guidelines on The O'Reilly Factor. I'm guessing she realized O'Reilly would refuse to be bound by her rules, and would thus not concern himself overmuch with "creating a safe atmosphere for discussion." It's a tragic loss to our civic culture: I for one would have given much to see Weber trying to operate in a No Spin Zone.